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In May 1794 John Thelwall was arrested on suspicion of high treason, imprisoned until December and put on trial at the Old Bailey. The chief crime alleged against him was that, together with other members of the London Corresponding Society and Society for Constitutional Information who were also arrested, he had participated in the meetings of a committee aiming to organize a convention intended to achieve a reform in parliament – by universal manhood suffrage, annual parliaments, and (so the prosecution claimed, on the flimsiest of evidence) the abolition of the House of Lords. According to the law officers of the crown, who conducted the prosecution, the committee was to have claimed to be a convention of delegates of the whole people, and far more representative therefore than the corruptly elected House of Commons. On the basis of this claim it would either have announced that it had superseded parliament, or, by its strength of numbers, would have sought to ‘overawe’ parliament into agreeing to a reform.

The leaders of the reform societies themselves gave a different and altogether more plausible account of what they were trying to do. Under interrogation they could be vague about it, no doubt aware that to specify the convention as having any particular aim would lay themselves open to a charge of some sort. Thus Thomas Hardy, secretary of the LCS, told the Privy Council that the aim of the convention was ‘to inform the Nation of the necessity of a Parliamentary Reform, and then the business will do itself; though I do not exactly know how’. In other examinations by the council, and in various publications of the society, its members explained that they planned to call a convention of delegates not of the whole nation, but of reform societies from around Britain, in order to confer on the possibility of summoning a further convention which could truly claim to represent the people at large and not just the societies themselves.

Caleb Williams, fleeing from Fernando Falkland and his creature, his all-seeing spy Gines, repeatedly determines to conceal himself in London. Throughout the eighteenth century, London had become an increasingly divided city, as those who could afford to do so moved into the squares and wide streets of the West End. By the end of 1792, France, newly declared a republic, was at war with Austria and Prussia, and the movement for parliamentary reform had revived in Britain. Thus for most of the 1790s London was a city divided politically, but the division was as unequal as were the economic, cultural and geographic divisions. In the highest levels of the political world, the breakdown of cordiality between the supporters of Pitt's government and the Foxite Whigs was confirmed in the clubs of St James's Street. The government joined with loyalist opinion in blaming the LCS also for the outrages of 29 October 1795.

Early nineteenth-century Edinburgh had a lot less time for James Hogg than for “the Ettrick Shepherd,” the literary persona created partly by Hogg himself, partly by the tight circle that ran Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Comic, bibulous, full of naïve folk-wisdom, easy to patronize, the Ettrick Shepherd was invented as a souvenir of the pastoral lowlands, a survival whose presence among one of the Edinburgh literary élites could represent both the continuity of modern Scots culture and the impolite past it had left behind. The Ettrick Shepherd, though perhaps more pliable, certainly more reassuringly conservative than Burns had been, could not always be relied upon to play this part, and had occasionally to be reminded of his place by editors, reviewers, even by himself. But he was much more comfortable to be with than James Hogg, the author of obsessive, experimental fictions which either satirized or ignored the decencies of polite letters. To some degree even these could be bowdlerized and domesticated, as many of them were in the Victorian collections of Hogg's fiction published after his death, and passed off as written “by the Ettrick Shepherd.” But one in particular, and for my money the best of them – The Three Perils of Woman – was immediately recognized as irredeemable by its first reviewers, and until 1995 had never been reprinted.

The Three Perils of Woman was published in 1823, a year before The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

This essay is not an attempt to discuss, in general terms, the reputation and reception of Thomson's poems in the 1790s. Indeed, it ignores completely what was certainly, to readers of that decade as of any other, the most important aspect of his writing, his descriptions of natural scenery. Instead the essay tries to exemplify, however selectively, how Thomson's poetry came to be taken up in the controversies of the 1790s. It argues, to begin with, that after 1789 the political passages and poems of Thomson, and Liberty especially, became briefly ‘readable’ in a way they had not been for decades: they were seen to offer an account of political virtue, and of the consequences of the lack of it, which could support a range of arguments, from liberal Whiggism to popular radicalism, by which the French Revolution, at least in its early stages, could be approved, and political reform, in some degree or another, could be advocated at home. The terms and conditions of this new readability, however, made it short-lived; in the late 1790s, when the movement for parliamentary reform was largely repressed, and the nation became arguably more unified under the threat of a French invasion, it disappeared as quickly as it had appeared, and Liberty never again achieved the importance it had briefly enjoyed. Throughout the decade, however, Thomson's reputation had also continued to be shaped by longer-term historical changes with an apparently more oblique relation to discourses of public politics: in particular perhaps the privatization, the sentimentalization, the feminization of literature, as opposed, in particular, to the discourses of politics itself.

When I wrote this essay, I had never been to Dorset. But I make that confession, not to disqualify myself from writing but to indicate at the outset the sort of essay it will not be. It will not be concerned with the identification of places in the Wessex novels with their possible originals in Dorset and the neighbouring counties. That task has already been performed more than a few times, most convincingly by Denys Kay-Robinson, and by Andrew Enstice whose work is especially useful where it points out how Hardy manipulated the geography of Dorset to create the imaginary space called Wessex. Nor am I offering – I would be equally incompetent to offer – the sort of study that H. C. Darby has made of the regional geography of Hardy's Wessex – a study whose implications have still to be taken up by literary critics and humanist geographers, in that it would seem possible to base upon it an understanding of how the plots and the narrative structures of Hardy's novels might have been to a degree determined by their various settings.

This essay sets out instead to examine how localities and spaces in Hardy's novels are constructed, are mapped, by the characters in the novels, and therefore also by Hardy in his narrative and by us as we read. I am concerned, then, with different, subjective geographies, and with geographies as modes of cognition.

I want to offer a comment on some ideas about landscape that are commonly found among writers on art, on literature, and on various other subjects in the second half of the eighteenth and in the early years of the nineteenth centuries in Britain. The main point of my doing this is to show how a correct taste, here especially for landscape and landscape art, was used in this period as a means of legitimating political authority, particularly but not exclusively within the terms of the discourse of civic humanism. If we interrogate writers of the polite culture of this period on the question of what legitimates this claim, one answer we repeatedly discover, though it may take very different forms, is that political authority is rightly exercised by those capable of thinking in general terms; which usually means those capable of producing abstract ideas – decomplex ideas – out of the raw data of experience. The inability to do this was usually represented as in part the result of a lack of education, a lack which characterized women and the vulgar; and because women are generally represented in this period as incapable of generalising to any important degree, I shall be in this paper very careful not to use a vocabulary purged of sexist reference: when I speak of what men thought, of Man in general, of the spectator as he, I am doing so with forethought, and in order to emphasize the point that, in the matter of political authority, legitimated as I have described, women were almost entirely out of the question, and the issue to be determined was which men could pass the test of taste.